Review of Stream and some comparison to Wistia and Youtube

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We are in the process of trying out a few different providers for streaming video files to determine which is best for us.

We embedded 3 video files on one web page, ran a few speed and load tests, changed the video embed codes to the same videos on a different provider, and then reran the same tests. Here are some of the notable results and other factors.

Overall rendered page size:

  • Cloudflare added the most to the page size.
  • Wistia added the least to the page size (likely because they use .jpg thumbnails instead of .png like Cloudflare)

Page load time:

  • Cloudflare was the fastest.
  • Youtube was the slowest.

Requests Made:

  • Cloudflare made the least additional requests.
  • Youtube made the most additional requests.

Available Analytics:

  • Cloudflare has the least statistics available.
  • Youtube and Wistia provide some detailed statistics, and this really depends on what information you are looking for as to which is better.

Pricing:

  • Youtube is free (which is both good and bad).
  • Cloudflare pricing is based on number of minutes of video content stored and streamed per month.
  • Wistia’s plans are per video, and you may see extra charges if you exceed an undisclosed amount of bandwidth per month.

Our team chose Cloudflare, but would definitely love to see reduced file sizes and more detailed statistics.

Thanks for the great service Cloudflare!

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Thanks for posting this review to the community :slight_smile:

I was wondering if you also tried out videos embedded via Google Drive in Addition to Youtube. Youtube probably has a lot more of the YT bloat like recommendations, while some of that may be removed if you embed a video from drive. This probably would only be useful for this test alone, since Drive will take down files if they have too much traffic, but i’d be interesting to see the difference between YT and Drive.

Thanks for the comparison.

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Hi Josh, I work on the Stream team at Cloudflare. Thank you for using Stream and for sharing your valuable insights with the community!

We’re working to make more of the analytics data available. Is there any specific data that you’d particularly find helpful? I’d love to hear from you and anyone else about your use cases and the types of analytics data which could be beneficial.

-Zaid

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